The rain has gone off with unusually perfect timing for my walk. I’ve hopped on a bus and then walked along the road to where I was born and grew up. The river is behind me as I face the little flats my family once called home. To my left is a huge concrete square. The paving stones are still higgledy piggledy. We usually ignored those bits of higgledy piggledy. It didn’t stop us playing, tig, kick-the-can-run-away, two-man hunt, football, whizzing around on our bikes, or trying unsuccessfully to play tennis.
Our lines were marked out with the green paint someone had found and marked out a tennis court with. You know that council building green paint, the same paint every building seemed to have on every wall inside? That paint. We used a bit of old orange nylon rope tied between two of the trees that were meant to make it look nice. Nice. I don’t remember those little trees looking nice; they were bare twigs.  Those improvised tennis court lines are long gone now. Read more…